Washington State Magazine

Fall 2003

Panoramas

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Is growth anti-democratic?

"Growth is a costly and dangerous process," says John H. Bodley,
professor of anthropology at Washington State University. For the
past several years, Bodley has been researching the role of scale,
or size of communities, as it relates to socioeconomic growth and
prosperity. His hypothesis is that growth is an elite-directed
process. In other words, although the majority of people bear the
costs associated with growth, only a few receive the primary
benefits.

In all cases that Bodley has studied–from the global community
to small towns–his hypothesis holds true. The bottom line is that
as scale increases, fewer people reap the rewards of growth.

There are different kinds of growth, says Bodley. "Sometimes
growth involves segmentation–a society grows to a certain size, it
reaches a threshold, and then splits into two or more similar
societies. This kind of growth fills up a space with more societies
of the same size," he says.

"The other kind of growth involves a single society getting
larger. It is growth by aggregation, or accumulation," Bodley says.
"This is growth that changes scale and requires cultural
transformation such as bureaucratization and specialization, and it
concentrates power." Bodley studies this second type of growth.

Bodley says you can apply the theory that growth is an
elite-directed process to any socioeconomic category, such as
American taxpayers by size of income or American corporations by
size of revenue. These are two measurements you can find in
Bodley's latest book, The Power of Scale, A Global History
Approach (M.E. Sharpe, 2003). The book reveals that as the
number of taxpayers or businesses increases, wealth becomes
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

This is the case on both a global and community scale, says
Bodley. A few years ago he tested his power-elite hypothesis in the
Palouse region of eastern Washington and published his findings in
an article titled, "Socioeconomic Growth, Culture Scale and
Household Well-Being" (Current Anthropology, December
1999).

Bodley ranked property owners in 27 municipalities in the
Palouse by the value of their property. His data show that as the
size of communities increased, or as villages became towns and
cities, a few families became very prosperous, while the number of
poor and maintenance-level households increased. In other words,
the gap between the haves and have-nots grew bigger.

A small number of prosperous families typically own property and
become the power elite. In their power positions, they become
involved in city and county government and are able to encourage
further growth through annexation and zoning changes. Thus, these
elite individuals increasingly concentrate their power, and the
growth process becomes self-perpetuating.

Bodley has concluded that the perception that growth benefits
everyone is inaccurate. "Growth is not likely to benefit the
majority of the population."

Bodley's research also suggests that the concentration of wealth
due to increases in scale diminishes the democratic process and is
costly to the non-elite. Often the non-elite end up subsidizing the
cost of programs created by the power-elite by bearing
increases in the cost of such things as transportation, storage,
packaging, and advertising. Bodley goes on to say that urban
growth, national markets, and large accumulations of private
wealth, whether held by individuals or corporations, must be
supported by taxpayer-funded subsidies to pay for the necessary
infrastructure including police, courts, public education, and the
military.

In his study of the Palouse, he found that non-property-owners
in towns of 2,500 people or less participate in the governance of
their communities. This is less likely to be the case in larger
cities, where government positions are often held by elite property
owners.

Based on this finding, Bodley concludes that "to the extent that
growth concentrates power, it is anti-democratic."